Demisch Danant presents Innovation: made in France II. A mid-century French design exhibition about important historical French design created between 1965 and 1975.
Innovation is a true celebration of mid-century French design and is in the line of the gallery’s year-long exhibition program made in France, which reintroduces post-war designers and highlights how important and decisive their work is. This decade was a key-period during which the distinctive new aesthetic in French public and domestic life was created.
In France, “Les Trente Glorieuses” refer to the three decades after the World War II , they were marked by a huge scientific, technological, economic, and social development. These advances kept exuberant public optimism up in the 1960s. It was the time of national positivism and it remained uninterrupted until the beginning of the 1973 Oil Crisis. During this bustling period, art, architecture, decorative arts, and fashion flourished.
Demisch Danant wanted to celebrate the vision and breakthroughs that shaped this creative boom through this mid-century French design exhibition. She brings critical attention to the impact of this revolutionary period in French historical design through works made by Roger Tallon, Jean-Pierre Laporte, Jean Dudon, Roger Fatus, Bernard Govin, Olivier Mourgue, Pierre Paulin and Jean-Pierre Vitrac.
The introduction of plastic and synthetic resins in the 1960s allowed designers to stop working with orthogonal rigidity and thus create anthropomorphic forms that corresponded with the period’s broader social liberation. The emergence of new lighting technologies greatly influenced designers during that period. More sophisticated fluorescent tubes and the arrival of new halogen bulbs sparked creativity in architectural lighting.